March 2009

March 31 2009

On Wednesday afternoon, I'll be speaking at the re:publica conference on social media in Berlin, Germany. In what I hope will be an increasingly-frequent opportunity, my presentation will be done remotely, using make.tv technology. The site needs a lot of horsepower and bandwidth, but that's a wor...

March 31 2009

A comment at this week's Notes/Domino software design review prompted the development team to start a blog...to help with awareness of the Domino Configuration Tuner, one of the coolest new tools in Domino 8.5. The 'Tuner blog is live, and the first post rightly proclaims "DCT Rules!" (oh, maybe th...

March 31 2009

Deliberate attempt to cause market confusion? From Redmond? That would never happen.Over the weekend, I received information about what appears to be the new Microsoft server product recently preannounced by CEO Steve Ballmer. Steve revealed the new software during a Feb. 24 meeting with financia...

March 29 2009

Yesterday, I had the honor of speaking with students and faculty at Bowling Green State University's 3rd Conference on Students Global Competitiveness. The conference was organized by Jake Gallardo, a senior at BGSU, and the officers of the Students Initiative for Global Competitiveness. I enjoyed...

March 27 2009

First of a two-part series on globalizing your Notes/Domino applications...Globalizing Lotus Notes applications is a challenge for a lot of customers. The code and translatable strings of Lotus Notes applications are combined by their nature. Developers usually develop a Lotus Notes application in o...

March 27 2009

Much like an effort conducted back in Q4 2008, my team is surveying IBM customers about your Notes/Domino 8.x deployments. Jan Kenney writes:If you or your customer is an IBM Lotus Notes/iNotes and Domino 8.x (8.0.x OR 8.5) customer who has EITHER: * Deployed Notes/iNotes and Domino version 8....

March 25 2009

This is kind of a jumble of interesting data points, but I'm jazzed about the way these events are going and wanted to share. At Lotusphere Comes to You in Paris tomorrow, over 600 people are registered. The event is sold out -- they stopped taking registrations days ago. A memo went out to IBMe...

March 24 2009

This one tweeted out of the bag last night, and while we are still staging a few pages here and there, it's at least live enough to talk about. The IBM.com team approached me a few weeks ago and asked if I would be interested in adding a more personal connection on the product pages of the various...

March 23 2009

For this week and the next three, my good friend and colleague Colleen Hayes is part of the IBM Service Corps initiative. She is in the Philippines for her assignment, and is blogging on ibm.com for the duration. While I am extremely frustrated that the site requires you to register in order to co...

March 23 2009

As Paul Mooney and Warren Elsmore announced earlier today, registration is now open for the absolutely 100% free UK Lotus User Group meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland on 8 and 9 October, 2009. The UKLUG is now in its third year, and looks to be even bigger and better than the successful 2008 event in...

March 22 2009

Just going through my snail mail from the week away.... inside the mailer from IBM shareholder services, along with the proxy ballot for the 2009 shareholder meeting is the following insert... With 1.34 billion shares of IBM outstanding, we must mail out a lot of these proxy statements. There's...

March 21 2009

Home from one trip, ready for the next. Next Saturday, March 28, I'll be speaking at the 3rd Conference on Students Global Competitiveness at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. The topic of the conference is "Social Networking for Good". Other speakers are from Yahoo! and Rootwork.org. I'm...

March 19 2009

Of course you can -- in less than ten minutes, in fact. IBM is currently conducting a survey of customers around your experience with IBM electronic support and areas where we can improve the experience. The input from this survey will help with the overall initiative, which includes elements to...

March 19 2009

First, let's get the important stuff out of the way -- the Belux Lotus User Group meeting today was a huge success. About 200 attendees filled the IBM Forum in Brussels to learn about the latest from IBM Lotus. Congratulations and thank you Thierry Soubestre from Pixelixir along with Laurent and t...

March 19 2009

The Notes performance team has published an updated whitepaper covering scalability of the Notes 8.5 client on the Citrix XenApp server....This white paper provides an overview of, and recommendations for, how to get the most from your IBM® Lotus® Notes® client on the Citrix XenApp server. In partic...

March 19 2009

PC Magazine's Michael Miller takes a long look at Lotus Notes 8.5:Many people I talk to are surprised that I run Lotus Notes, but it's really not that unusual. Sure, Microsoft's solutions have long since overtaken Notes in the sheer number of business users, and a number of webmail solutions have mu...

March 18 2009

Thank you again to all my various hosts in Copenhagen -- Mikala and Bo from IBM, Convergens, NotesNet.DK, and INOPI. That was 48 hours well-spent, with a lot of great insight. Today's Lotusphere Comes to You, sponsored by INOPI, was well-attended -- including my friends Henrik and Oluf, colleagues...

March 17 2009

Yay! As channel announced last week, the first release of AlloyTM by IBM and SAP is now available! Congratulations to the IBM and SAP teams -- this has been a tremendous multi-company effort, and our customers are the winners. What is Alloy? I posted this video a few weeks ago, but it's...

March 17 2009

That's the way to do it...Some 50,000 Australian university students will receive a free version of IBM's Lotus Symphony software this month as part of on-campus promotions managed by StudentRights.com. Link: Computerworld Australia: 50,000 uni students get free Lotus Symphony...

March 17 2009

Good morning from Copenhagen. If you've been following my tweets, you'll know that I'm spending these couple of days at the Palace Hotel, right at the City Hall Square. The hotel, run by Le Méridien, is nearly complete with a major renovation. TripAdvisor reviews were accurate - the clock from t...

March 15 2009

The Notes Migration Blog has been running for eighteen months, documenting a real-world migration from Lotus Notes to Microsoft SharePoint. Yesterday, the author posted what appears to be his/her ultimate chapter. In the final episode, after a year and a half of actually doing what a lot of the hy...

March 13 2009

Bruce Elgort pointed me to the customer list page on Elgugi software's website. In just a eight months, Elgugi has won some really important and recognizable customers for their excellent IdeaJam software. But what this also says is that major organizations are investing in Domino applications t...

March 12 2009

I now present three links worthy of your attention today ... that merit more than a Thursday Twitter tweet: Domino 8.5 performance numbers on Dominoblog.com: Andrea Waugh-Metzger brings news of a report on IBM DeveloperWorks which captures the substantial improvements in Domino 8.5 efficiency in t...

March 12 2009

IBM announced today recognition of our award as CRN Channel Champion in various categories, including collaboration software.named a 2009 CRN Channel Champion at an awards ceremony in New Orleans, LA on March 10 at the XChange Solution Provider conference. The CRN Channel Champions study measures o...

March 11 2009

Yes, Microsoft senior vice president says it that bluntly in the pages of Forbes.com today:The behemoth of Redmond, Wash., is methodically rolling out business software that's sold as an online service. There's a very compelling reason: For Microsoft, selling software-as-a-service means more revenue...

March 10 2009

From time to time, I hear complaints about how difficult IBM makes it for someone to buy Lotus Notes. While it is true that Passport Advantage, IBM's volume licensing program, has many dimensions and nuances, they tend to be more relevant in large, multi-site, multi-national companies. If you want...

March 10 2009

This afternoon, I was talking with my boss about some of the recent discussions on the blogs in the Lotus community. I have been struggling for days with whether to say silent or speak up. Earlier today, I was content to read silently. Tonight, Bruce Elgort's posting tonight prompted me to speak....

March 10 2009

Happy to see that business partner TLCC has jumped on the training bandwagon for Notes/Domino 8.5. TLCC just announced three new courses -- ND 8.5 system administration update (covering topics like DAOS and Domino Configuration Tuner), ND 8.5 application development update (covering Domino Designer...

March 10 2009

Some updates to my calendar for next week... seems like we've got a lot of attention going into Denmark, with Mary Beth just having visited, my trip next week, and an April stop that Andre Guirard just blogged about. My visit next week is two-fold -- a Lotusphere Comes to You in Copenhagen, sponsor...

March 9 2009

IBM Press has published a useful new book: Survival Guide for Lotus Notes and Domino Administrators. Written by IBMer Mark Elliott, the book covers essentials on configuring the Notes client, including end-user settings as well as how to use policies, and key new features of Notes/Domino 8. Ther...

March 9 2009

LotusUserGroup.org has announced details of the online version of Lotusphere Comes to You 2009. Sixteen Lotusphere sessions will be delivered online starting March 24. Brent Peters and I will be delivering the Notes/Domino strategy and future directions session on March 27 at 11 AM EDT. You'll...

March 9 2009

Gartner's Jeffrey Mann writes today about a few new tools for Outlook from a company called Kayxo. The tools include Google desktop and calendar integration as well as database/workflow integration. All of that -- stuff we do in Notes today. The interesting part (for my audience at least) of Mann...

March 6 2009

I'm really happy to announce that the New England Lotus User Group will be relaunching next month, on Wednesday, April 22. I'll be speaking at this meeting on a Notes/Domino 2009 update, and the open Q&A forum that the NELotus group is famous for. Only question I forgot to ask is whether we're...

March 4 2009

Declan Lynch has been an XPages machine for the last couple of weeks. Over at qtzar.com, he has written 32 entries (so far?) on "Learning XPages". Now you all know I'm not an application developer, but Dec has succeeded in dividing up XPages into consumable chunks that anyone (even I) can understa...

March 3 2009

Articles about Exchange 14 have been trickling out for the last six or eight weeks, but every one is more confusing than the last. Today's CNET article from Ina Fried continues the double-talk. Microsoft continues to say things like"If you walk by the site of a skyscraper under construction, it lo...

March 3 2009

Wednesday the 4th in Japan (so right about now) is the 15th anniversary of the Notes Consortium. This organization represents the Notes customers and business partners in the Japanese market. While I have not been over to Japan in about 18 months, I definitely plan to journey over this year --...

March 2 2009

Gartner's Matt Cain examines new cost-saving features of Domino (mainly 8.5) and how they stack up. Some really strong recommendations around taking advantage of Domino features to drive down costs, including DAOS, Domino Configuration Tuner, etc. Gartner also suggests that companies look at their...

March 2 2009

Cool interview with IBM Lotus senior technical staff member Ajamu Wesley:Ajamu Wesley's calling was made clear early in life, when at the age of eight he was introduced to computer programming by his mother. Her 30-year tenure at IBM gave Wesley unparalleled insight into the corporate world and adva...

March 2 2009

I thought this was a good article from the perspective of the collaboration market overall and where things are at today. Quotes from Gartner's Gene Phifer and IBM Lotus's Michael Garbett fill in the picture on changing trends and market opportunities. The article is especially timely for me as...

March 1 2009

My dad was kind enough to buy my family a Kindle for the holidays last year....only Amazon had run out of Kindles and put us on a waitlist. The ETA was March, 2009. Somewhere in between, Amazon announced and begun shipping the new Kindle 2, so this is what they shipped us. It arrived earlier this...